Mohammad Shtayyeh offers to resign as Palestinian prime minister

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has tendered his resignation, in a long-anticipated move that could set the stage for a new technocratic government responsible for the reconstruction of Gaza.

Shtayyeh on Monday offered his resignation in a letter to President Mahmoud Abbas, who leads the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. Abbas has yet to accept the resignation and appoint a new government. Until that is announced, Shtayyeh’s government will serve in a caretaker capacity.

The international community, led by the US, has called on Abbas to institute significant reforms in the PA as part of a move to “revitalise” the financially strapped and unpopular entity. Western and Arab states believe the Palestinians should form a technocratic administration to govern after Israel’s conflict with Hamas ends, as part of a broader postwar plan to push for a settlement to the protracted Israel-Palestinian crisis.

Any new government would also be responsible for overseeing Gaza’s reunification with the occupied West Bank. The two Palestinian territories split apart after Hamas’s violent takeover of the coastal enclave in 2007.

Addressing his cabinet on Monday, Shtayyeh said the “next stage and its challenges requires new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the new reality in the Gaza Strip . . . the urgent need for an inter-Palestinian [national] consensus . . . and the extension of the [PA’s] authority over the entire territory of Palestine”.

Elections in the occupied Palestinian Territories have not been held in nearly two decades. Abbas, 88, was elected to a four-year presidential term in 2005, with the last legislative elections held the subsequent year.

Abbas rules by presidential decree, presiding over pockets of limited self-government in the major cities of the West Bank…